I grew up in Detroit and only moved to Indy about 8 years ago. I've been to Chicago a number of times. Sometimes for a day, sometimes longer. I just came back from a weekend there.
What I learned in Chicago
What I learned in Chicago
- They accept American money. Who knew?
- Traffic sucks. A lot. Even on the toll roads which also suck. Detroit's sucks too, but mostly because the roads are all falling apart. Chicago's sucks because there are too damn many cars and too damn many intersections and expressway interchanges.
- If you don't know your way around, you better have a GPS. Even then, you will make at least one wrong turn per hour.
- Find out what "The Loop" is before you go. No one in town will tell you. If you ask them, they will look at you like you just grew a second head.
- Most of the Downtown area is fairly nice and fairly clean, and there are lots of things to do and see. More things than you can do in a weekend.
- You better like Chicago-style pizza and Chicago-style hot dogs or you're going to have a problem finding things to eat, in spite of the massive number of restaurants.
- Chicago-style pizza is only available in Chicago. Anyone else claiming to sell a "Chicago-style pizza" (especially if they call it a "stuffed pizza") is lying. It's almost always just one pizza upside down on top of another one, which is not anything at all like a real Chicago-style pizza. A real Chicago-style pizza is more like a pizza-flavored quiche.
- Chicago is a sports town. You think Indianapolis is a sports town, but you're dead wrong. You're so wrong that you don't even realize what a black hole for sports Indiana is. You have the Colts and the Pacers. That's it. And no one but Hoosiers cares about either one. Even Detroit's a bigger sports town than Indy and Detroit is practically a ghost town.
- Chicago is windy. All the time. Hence the moniker "The Windy City". I don't think it actually gets warm until mid-July.
- I don't like being disarmed (not even a knife) for three days.
- The U-505 is the only Type IX-C U-Boat left and one of only five U-Boats total remaining. In the entire world. Five. You won't get as good a look at the inside as you'd like.
- Everyone is making money off of Obama except for you. You can't go ten feet without finding someone selling his book, t-shirts, cardboard cutouts, collector's plates, belt buckles, commemorative plaques, photographs, wall art, and pretty much anything else you can slap either The Annointed One's image on or the Presidential Seal.
- Everything in Chicago is expensive. From the gas that's 40 cents more than ours (in the city, it's 60 cents more) to the toll roads, the restaurants, taxis, food, admission to EVERYTHING...
- My Sprint Treo 700 phone works much better in Chicago than anywhere in Indiana.
- Molly's Cupcakes sells the "Ron Bennington". If you don't know what that means, you need to find out as quickly as possible. Make the trip, if necessary.
- Chicago has great restaurants, great museums, great attractions, great architecture, great hockey (and some other sports, I guess), and you couldn't pay me enough money to live there.
